On being a female captive

Women do not fare very well in wartime, especially if they happen to be
on the losing side. When the Red Army swept into Germany in 1945,
the Soviet soldiers raped women from eight to eighty years
of age, in numbers that will always remain unknown, though estimates
range from tens of thousands on up to two million. The Japanese
Imperial Army was equally infamous for its practice of conscripting
conquered civilians as "comfort women" in military brothels.

In
Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II
Katherine Jolluck takes up the
question of whether and to what extent Polish women in exile were
similarly abused by their Soviet overlords. She was early struck by
the almost total lack of such incidents in the extensive accounts left
by these women after they escaped to freedom in 1942. (Jolluck is
a senior lecturer in East European Studies at Stanford, and the written
reports are on file at the Stanford's Hoover Institution.)

Comparing the "traditional estimate" with
the more recent revisions by Gurjanow and Glowacki, the 980,000
civilians in the four deportations in 1940 and 1941 are reduced to
315,267/319,000, or less than one-third. p.13

"Before the war, Polish Catholic women
continually received reminders of the necessity of covering their
bodies.... [T]he Catholic monthly Rycerz Niepokolanej (The Knight
of the Virgin Mary), by far the most popular journal in Poland,
placed the burden of chaste deportment, seen as crucial to the health
of the family and the nation, on females.
Catholic writers denounced short skirts, thin fabric, low-cut or
sleeveless blouses, skin-colored stockings, and short
hair--anything, that is, that revealed or
highlighted the contours or the skin of the female body.... It was
the duty of females to 'defend virtue, faith, and noble-minded influence
on public and private decency.'" p.160

Difficulties of women in the Gulag almost
never mentioned by women and rarely by men. One male exception wrote:
"The lot of women in the work camps was horrible. I can say that it was
worse than that of animals. They were treated like 'goods' to be used,
traded for a piece of bread. If one didn't want to have a 'protector'--a
so-called 'camp husband'--then she was ill-treated, her life made
disgusting, so that we must really give the greatest credit to those
not numerous Polish women who came through the hell clean." Jolluck
notes the irony that this effort to honor women nevertheless accepts
the notion that those who succumbed to force or necessity were made
dirty by the experience. "This man's characterization of the plight of
women in the camps makes it clear why the women themselves would choose,
even had to choose, to remain silent." p.174

"Though greatly concerned with hygiene and
washing, women avoid the topic of menstruation. There are only two references
to this bodily process in the women's statements--one of which is oblique
and purely incidental--and two in reports by men." One woman noted that the
NKVD officers confiscated all personal belongings: "They don't want to
return even the belt indispensable at certain times for a woman."
Another spoke of the difficulty in obtaining enough cotton wool to make
menstrual pads. (Most women stopped having periods in the camps, which
they attributed to a food additive but more likely was the result of
malnutrition. A few had constant bleeding. "The hygienic conditions
were appalling and cotton wool was not to be had." p.176

"Pregnancy itself is discussed only in certain
limited contexts. [One woman's] unusually frank account of harrassment
by her interrogator is the only one that touches upon the possibility of
conception. Otherwise, only a few men register the occurrence of
illegitimate pregnancies. [One man] recalls 'an unpleasant incident' in
his settlement in Kazakhstan: 'namely, one of the Polish women, the wife
of a policeman ... with two children, had a third child with a Russian,
the head of the cafeteria. It happened undoubtedly in order to ensure her
subsistence.' Despite the many allusions to rape and forced prostitution,
women never mention fear of pregnancy, actual pregnancy, childbirth, or
abortions that would accompany sexual encounters and attacks.
If any of the exiled women struggled with the
dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy, neither their agonies nor their
solutions were passed on in written form after evacuation from the
USSR." p.177

(Elsewhere, Jolluck cites letters from
two Polish women to their husbands confessing to their formal or
informal marriage to a Soviet citizen, asking their forgiveness,
and stating their inability to leave the USSR or their choice
not to do so.)

In exile, "the able-bodied adult communities
were largely and unnaturally female. The unfamiliar and unsettling
demographics of exile undermined the coherence and authority of the
uprooted Poles, who countered by reinforcing their own conceptions of
national boundaries and gender certainties." They were especially likely
to condemn the sexual mores of Russian and Kazakh women, and likewise
those from Polish national minorities. p.186

Though judging them harshly in exile, this
was not the impression they brought with them from Poland.
"In fact, most Polish women seem to have
initially considered the national minorities as their own, as fellow
members of a collective, of one broad fatherland." (That is, Polish
citizens of Ukrainian and Jewish ethnicity.) p.189

"Forced by Soviet authoities to live in Asia,
in close proximity to its native inhabitants and in material conditions
more destitute than they had previously known, the women from Poland
refused to fit in, rejecting any blurring of the boundaries they
perceived between themselves (Westerners) and the Central Asians
(Easterners).... The boundary between Polish women and Central Asian
women is a chasm that separated, in the Polish imagination, the
civilized from the barbarous." p.221 (One wonders how Jolluck herself
would have fit in!)

"In a recent study, Piotr Zaron estimates
that as a result of the four deportations [but primarily that of April 1940],
approximately 150,000 Polish citizens--80 percent of them
women and children--were scattered in at least 1,206 different
localities in Kazakhstan." p.222 (quoting a 1999 Polish study)

"The Russian government began exiling Poles
to Kazakhstan in the late eighteenth century, and continued to do so
throughout the period of the partitions, particularly after the failed
rebellions of 1830 and 1863." p.223

"Most of the actual encounters with locals
that the Poles recount are frightening." The locals are usually men,
a society "without the civilizing order of gender, and, therefore,
more akin to animals than humans." p232

"the Poles effectively erase the women of
Soviet Central Asia from view." p242

"On the whole, Poles did not identify with
Russian politicals [that is, Russian citizens who had been exiled
like themselves]
and rarely crossed national lines to form friendships with them."
256

"The widespread characterization of Russian
women as openly and aggressively sexual alone signals their otherness
to Polish women. For these Poles, in accordance" p268 "with Catholic
doctrine and tradition, female sexuality is legitimate only within
the bounds of marriage, and it constitutes an exceedingly private and
taboo subject." p269